Tom Martin: Mommy Mobile draws ire of hip nonbreeders

It’s official. My wife and I are the proud owners of a minivan. Well, maybe not so proud.

Tom Martin

It’s official. My wife and I are the proud owners of a minivan. Well, maybe not so proud.

It’s an inferno-red minivan with a luggage rack on top. It has a back seat that flips around to face the back so we can sit in the van, lift the back hatch and watch soccer games. We might as well buy a Celine Dion Greatest Hits CD and call it a life.

Dignity is overrated. Right?

It’s a Chrysler Town & Country, which is nice because we can drive it both in town AND the country. I don’t know about the city. It’s not a Town & Country & City, so I guess we’ll avoid metropolitan areas. Still, as minivans go, it’s a nice one. A 2005 model.

The purchase puts us among the mushy legions of domesticated drivers who shed their street cred for the sake of space, convenience and -- dare I say it? -- the children. We have two boys younger than age 3. We spend much of our time binding them to their car seats.

And so I climb behind the steering wheel of our Mommy Mobile with ambivalence. My wife and I didn’t aspire to play ball in the minivan league, yet we came by it practically. We needed more space, didn’t want (and couldn’t afford) an SUV and couldn’t find a station wagon with wood paneling on the sides. (OK, we didn’t look that hard.) Now we find ourselves the butt of non-minivan drivers’ jokes because, among other things, our vehicles hurt cool people’s eyes.

Laugh if you will, but minivan haters are organized, and some of them can spell. A Web site called P.A.M.V. (People Against Minivans) consists of people railing against minivans and their owners.

Here’s what they had to say:

About minivans:

n “Horrid sloth mobiles.”

n “Ugly boxes.”

n “The most ugly, hulking, unsexy vehicles known to man.”

About minivan drivers:

n “They play their Barney music so loud, I need 1,200 watts of stereo system to drown it out.”

n “Fat people drive them.”

n “They drive like the living dead.”

n “They put on the brakes for no reason.”

One writer is concerned that we fat minivan drivers, who are visibly prolific breeders, will continue to populate the earth with offspring that will also drive minivans. The result will be a dwindling population of hip nonbreeders. That would be a shame.

Another writer to the Web site said anyone who buys a vehicle based on the number of cupholders it has cannot be a serious driver.

Vans weren’t always considered the milquetoast of the driving fleet. In the ’70s, guys named Rick and Rodney baring chests of hair drove these quadraphonic party boxes around with water beds in them. That’s right, water beds ... because it’s not a party unless you’re packing a couple hundred gallons of water.

My best friend bought a full-sized van in the late 1970s. I don’t remember the model, but its paint job consisted of a patchwork of browns and oranges. The interior was wall-to-ceiling shag carpet. It was foxy. He didn’t have a water bed, but the thing had a table in it, so you could, you know, pull over and sit at a table at a moment’s notice. Nobody called it a sloth mobile.

People rocked in their vans back in the day. And there was that song “We made love in my Chevy van ...” A lot of love was manufactured in the ’70s. I’m not sure where it’s all gone, but apparently the minivan-hating Volvo drivers didn’t inherit any of it.

But who are we trying to fool? Our minivan doesn’t have shag carpet or a table.

As my wife drove home from the dealership in our “ugly box,” she checked out the stereo to hear “Bad to the Bone” by George Thorogood. Even the radio station was mocking us.

We once considered ourselves cool. But we needed a bigger vehicle and couldn’t afford one of those more stylish crossover SUVs. Cool is fine as long as it’s affordable. (News alert: Cool people don’t use the word “affordable.”) But I’m buying diapers for two every week. Elegance be damned.

I guess my wife and I are going to have to buy some Barney CDs and get used to braking for no reason. They say people are what they drive.

Well, we may be boxy, but at least we’re inferno-red. And regardless of what minivan critics say, our cupholders runneth over.

Tom Martin is editor of The Register-Mail. Contact him at tmartin@register-mail.com or 815-343-7181, Ext. 250.